Josh Kopelman

Managing Director of First Round Capital.

espite being coastally challenged (currently living in Philadelphia), Josh has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the Internet industry since its commercialization. In 1992, while he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation – an Internet information company. In 1996, Infonautics went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Monthly Archives for 2010

We host 50+ events for our portfolio companies a year -- and historically we've held off on sharing the content widely, since we viewed it as a benefit that came from being a member of the First Round Capital community. But some talks are so good they are meant to be shared with the world. So today we released a talk that Kellan Elliott-McCrea (the CTO of Etsy) gave at our last CTO Summit entitled "How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by 500% in One Year". After witnessing first-hand how challenging it can be to attract women engineers, Kellan shares lessons in building a process and culture to attract female engineers. Really compelling stuff -- on a very important topic...

When you have the
opportunity to partner with Jeff Atwood (aka Coding Horror) on a new company,
it's hard to say "no". And when you learn his new company is
reinventing forum software, a product that hasn't seen change in a couple
decades, it becomes a pretty easy "yes".

I was recently looking around online and found my very first forum
post (Usenet post from 1993) on the topic of Prodigy pricing changes. You
can see that post here. What you
quickly realize from reading this brief exchange (besides for my age) is that online forums as we know
them have been relatively unchanged for the past couple decades. It's one
of the last areas of the web that hasn't been touched by modern software or
product thinking. Blogs have changed substantially with Blogger,
WordPress and Tumblr. Connecting with friends has been rethought with Facebook
and news and information flow has been forever altered with Twitter. But
forums, an area of the internet that still produces massive amounts of content
and valuable knowledge, haven't been touched. In Jeff's recent post on his new company, he throws out just
a few examples of the robustness (and sometimes quirkiness) of online forums
today:

A 12 year old girl who finds a forum community
of rabid enthusiasts willing to help her rebuild a Fiero from
scratch? Check.

The most obsessive breakdown of Lego
collectible minifig kits you'll find anywhere on the Internet? Check.

Some of the most practical information on
stunt kiting in the world? Check.

The only place I could find with scarily
powerful squirt gun instructions and advice? Check.

There
are few better people on earth to take on this huge challenge than Jeff Atwood.
Jeff has spent a majority of his life thinking about text exchange on the
web. When we first starting talking, it was clear that the "exchange
of paragraphs" as he calls it was something deeply important to him. And that it was very different from his last company, Stack Exchange, a Q&A platform that allows domain experts to
share answers with one another (without the free-form dialog that occurs in forums). He's also built an incredible following on
his blog, Coding Horror, where
he explores everything from technology to the judicial system (if you haven't
read his post on being on a jury called "Somebody is to Blame for This" - please do it now.)

So with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Jeff and Discourse to the First Round Community and can't wait to be a part of the next
two decades of online forums! Try out the beta here...